Le Petit Prince

The Little Prince

This is a book for children on philosophy of life. At its core the book is a fable about war, not a description of war, rather about the emotions that war evokes, the uncertainty that war imposes, the fear experienced by victims and participants in war and about isolation. All that can be relieved or eased only by intimate associations and by love.  The trees that threaten to overtake the boy's asteroid are considered symbols for Nazis. The book is appropriate for children due to its visual imagination over its logic. Meaning is explored through contact with reality pure and simple over ideals of reality, that is for example, one cannot love roses as a set, idealized roses conceptualized, one can only love a single rose, simple and fragile and flawed and temporary. This is expressed in the book as purer perception of a child uncluttered with adult distortion and bias and by adult insistence.

The narrator draws a snake that has eaten an elephant. When shown to adults the adults  insist it is a picture of a hat because that is what the doodle-drawing looks like. When corrected, no, it is a snake that has eaten an elephant the adults insist maybe drawing is not for you perhaps better to look to other lines of preoccupation. But shown to a boy, the drawing is recognized for what it is, an elephant inside a snake.

In another instance the man is asked to draw a sheep. He tries but finds he cannot manage a sheep so he gives up and draws a box instead. When the drawing is shown to the boy, the book's Prince, an alien, the sole being from a nearby asteroid, he recognizes it immediately, "That's it!" Thus one of the central aphorisms: On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye." Those two lines there took some thirty edits. The book is whittled down to its bare essence. Entire episodes cut because they were deemed unnecessary to the thrust of the tale. 

 

Schrödinger's sheep

The whole book is heavily edited, in many areas as much as 2/3 removed. Dozens of final drawings edited, all the drawing of the narrator are edited out completely.  Drawing from his own experience as pilot, the pictures that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry drew of the pilot, himself by his downed plane in the Sahara are all removed for being too unambiguous, too concrete. The pictures still exist and they are displayed at special exhibitions but they are not in the book. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry doodled a lot and gave his pictures away. Many drawings were discovered by another pilot in the cockpit of his plane. Other drawings were  recovered from crumpled wads in his studio. He doodled on letters and on notes to friends, on napkins and table clothes, on scratches of paper. He doodled all over the place. But he was by no means an artist so these pictures, scribbles, paintings for the book are naïvely inept. 

The book was written at a large house on Long Island where a group of French expatriates held up during the Second World War. Saint-Exupéry never did manage English. His Salvadoran wife was unfaithful in the American sense of the word, but she was a true friend for life. This is believed to be the meaning of seeing with the eyes of the heart. Had he been able to see through all the trouble she caused him then he would have been better able to perceive her true love, she his imperfect tamed rose. Writing the book was suggested by the wife a publisher to occupy Saint-Exupéry's troubled mind while unhappily exiled here in the U.S. 

Saint-Exupéry met the Lindbergh family briefly and it is thought the character of the prince is based on their golden-haired son, Land Morrow Lindbergh, but then this:

[On a train] Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants..... This is a musician's face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine.... This little Mozart is condemned.

Dedication to a friend staying through the war inconspicuously in France :

To Leon Werth 

I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication: 

To Leon Werth,
When he was a little boy

Werth knew Saint-Exupéry's wrote a novella dedicated to him but did not see it until months after Saint-Exupéry's death. His plane disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean in July 1944

The book is translated into over 250 languages including some very strange unlikely to have any Western book translated including odd African languages and including Latin (but not including Egyptian Hieroglyphics and I try not to hold that against it, surely mere oversight.) There are forty-seven versions translated in Korean, fifty versions in Chinese.  The book continues to sell two million copies a year worldwide. There are widely varied adaptions from movies and TV, records, cassettes, and CDs, radio broadcasts, stage performances, graphic novels, board games, video games, and advertisements.

Oddly, I do not see mentioned on this  list of media the pop-up book version available through Abebooks for $10.75 including shipping, and through Amazon, of course, for a good deal more.